There came also to his hut, through a sullen snowstorm, upon the afternoon of All Soul's day, a horseman in a long cloak of black. He tethered his black horse without and strode softly through the door, and upon his breast and shoulders the snow was white as the bleached bones of those women that died in Merlin's youth.
"Greetings in God's name, Messire Edward Maudelain," the stranger said.
Since the new-comer spoke intrepidly of holy things a cheerier Maudelain knew that this at least was no demon. "Greetings!" he answered. "But I am Evrawc. You name a man long dead."
"But it is from a certain Bohemian woman I come. What matter, then, if the dead receive me?" And thus speaking, the stranger dropped his cloak.
In flame-colored satin he was clad, which shimmered with each movement like a high flame, and his countenance had throughout the color and the glow of amber. His eyes were dark and very tender, and the tears somehow had come to Maudelain's eyes because of a sudden and great love for this tall stranger. "Eh, from the dead to the dead I travel, as ever, with a message and a token. My message runs, Time is, O fellow satrap! and my token is this."
And in this packet, wrapped with white parchment and tied with a golden cord, was only a lock of hair. It lay like a little yellow serpent in Maudelain's palm. "And yet five years ago," he mused, "this hair was turned to dust. God keep us all!" Then he saw the tall lean emissary puffed out like a candle-flame; and upon the floor he saw the huddled cloak waver and spread like ink, and the white parchment slowly dwindle, as snow melts under the open sun. But in his hand remained the lock of yellow hair.
"O my only friend," said Maudelain, "I may not comprehend, but I know that by no unhallowed art have you won back to me." Hair by hair he scattered what he held upon the floor. "Time is! and I have not need of any token wherewith to spur my memory." He prized up a corner of the hearthstone, took out a small leather bag, and that day purchased a horse and a sword.
At dawn the Blessed Evrawc rode eastward in this novel guise. It was two weeks later when he came to Sunninghill; and it happened that the same morning the Earl of Salisbury, who had excellent reason to consider...
Follows a lacuna of fourteen pages. Maudelain's successful imposture of Richard the Second, so strangely favored by their physical resemblance, and the subsequent fiasco at Circencester, are now, however, tolerably notorious. It would seem evident, from the Argument of the story in hand, that Nicolas attributes a large part of this mysterious business to the co-operancy of Isabel of Valois, King Richard's infant wife. And (should one have a taste for the deductive) the foregoing mention of Bembo, when compared with "THE STORY OF THE SCABBARD," would certainly hint that Owain Glyndwyr had a finger in the affair.
It is impossible to divine by what method, according to Nicolas, this Edward Maudelain was eventually substituted for his younger brother. Nicolas, if you are to believe his "EPILOGUE," had the best of reasons for knowing that the prisoner locked up in Pontefract Castle in the February of 1400 was not Richard Plantagenet: and this contention is strikingly attested, also, by the remaining fragment of this same "STORY OF THE HERITAGE."